About Us

Dire Rugrat Publishing was born out of Kelly and Ken’s love of gaming. Many a session was spent on role-playing and world building; eventually the idea came to take some of these detailed pieces and share them with the rest of the world. And so Dire Rugrat Publishing was born.

Now this team of two is dedicated to breathing a little life into the role-playing portion of game night, and easing GM prep while doing it.

We are focused on creating easy to use GM tools, primarily drop in locations, NPCs, organizations, events, and encounters. Dire Rugrat Publishing has created numerous products aimed to add a little role-playing to your evening.

New Releases

5e NPCs: Goblins! Goblins! Goblins!

5e NPCs: Goblins! Goblins! Goblins! brings you 18 NPCs each with their own backstory, stat block and colour art. Custom abilities and unique histories make this a colourful collection of goblin NPCs for your party to encounter.

There are over 35 pages of NPC content and while all of the characters in the book are a goblin of some sort, numerous racial variants, capabilities, motivations, and challenges (ranging from 1/2 to 12) mean your PCs will never look at goblins the same way again.

Tangible Taverns: The Hut (5e)

Tangible Taverns: The Hut is a shelter for weary travellers. Delicious smells waft out of the weathered building and lights are visible through the windows. There are no signs denoting a name for the building, or even its purpose, but a welcoming feeling almost emanates from the large hut.

This PDF includes rumour and event tables, a tavern map, and descriptions of frequent faces about the establishment (which include names, physical features and personalities, as well as a few stat blocks).

Tavern Tales: Mini Adventures

Advantageous Abilities

Advantageous Abilities provides Game Masters a toolkit with which they can easily add feature abilities to monsters and NPCs, giving their NPCs an advantageous edge (or just a little role-playing fun).

testimonials

What our happy customers say

I’ve really come to like Kelly and Ken Pawlik’s style. There is a positive core to their writing, something deeply human that manages to elicit a sense of joy without being naïve or bland....
It’s hard to properly describe, but it could boil down to a sense of empathy with their fictitious creations. You can relate, in some way or another, with quite a few of them, with their motivations and characters.

Thilo G.

Endzeitgeist

Props to Dire Rugrat for writing some creative characters with intriguing and easily-playable personalities.

Craig C.

[A]bove anything else is just having a nice tavern that players can actually interact with...I've awkwardly tried to make things more interesting by improvising but there can be a lot of inns and taverns in a campaign so its taxing to make one that your players are willing to blow time on. [Tangible Taverns] makes my job as a GM easier, it gives me NPCs I don't have to make up and can hook up to any kind of campaign.